Repeat aloud some word — the first that occurs to you; house, for instance — over and over again; presently the sound of the word becomes meaningless and blank; you are puzzled and a morsel frightened as you hear it.

The earliest serious study known to me is M.F. Bassett and C.J. Warne, "On the Lapse of Verbal Memory with Repetition" (Minor Studies from the Psychological Laboratory of Cornell University XLIV), The American Journal of Psychology 30(4) 1919:

It is well known that if a familiar word be stared at for a time, or repeated aloud over and over again, the meaning drops away. In this paper we report the result of experiments whose aim was the determination of the number of repetitions required for monosyllabic nouns to lose their meaning.

The terms "verbal satiation" and "semantic satiation" came to be used to refer to this loss of meaningfulness. Thus Donald Smith and Alton Raygor, "Verbal satiation and personality", Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 52(3) 1956:

Satiation may be described as the reduction in effectiveness of a stimulus with continued exposure. The concept has been invoked to account for a number of diverse phenomena, loss of word meaning with repetition, visual alternation during fixation of ambiguous figures, boredom, alternation behavior of rats in a T maze, and diagnosis of brain lesion.

Several investigators have demonstrated that Ss experience a change or loss of meaning for words which have continuously repeated or fixated for a certain period of time. For instance, Bassett and Warne (1919) reported that the meanings of familiar nouns which were repeated aloud "dissipated" for their Ss within 3 or 4 sec. More recently, it was found that if Ss fixated a word exposed on a screen for 20 sec., their first association to the word is uncommon as measured by the Kent-Rosanoff Word Association Test (Smith & Raygor, 1956). […] Before the ful implication of this concept for theories of learning and meaning can be determined, it is necessary to develop a method for reliably measuring the extent of meaning change which be attributed to the satiation experience. […]

Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum (1957) have proposed an objective and reliable instrument for the measurement of certain aspects of connotative meaning. This instrument, the "semantic differential," consists of a series of scales each representing a 7-point, bipolar dimension. The meaning of a word, such as "father," is given by its position on an evaluative factor (its degree of goodness or badness), on an activity factor, and on a potency factor. The theory underlying this method assumes that the meaning of a word has a place in a multidimensional semantic space. A word without meaning would rest at the point of origin for all dimensions. […]

In the present studies, the semantic differential is used as a method of indexing changes in meaning induced by means of verbal repetition of words.

They found that after saying a word aloud 2-3 times per second for 15 seconds, subjects' estimates of its position in this semantic space moved to a point nearer the origin. A corresponding period of silence had almost no effect, and repeating a different word had a much smaller (and not statistically significant) effect.

If, rather than repeating a word to oneself, one listens to a recording of a word repeated over and over, a different effect occurs. Abrupt illusory changes are experienced, frequently involving considerable phonetic distortion. It is usually difficult to believe that the stimulus is not changing, even when the listener knows that all repetitions are identical. This "verbal transformation effect" has revealed some rather unexpected characteristics of speech perception and has suggested mechanisms underlying the perception of connected discourse.

Here's his description of his first experiment:

The first systematic study of the VT effect employed British sailors as subjects (Warren, 1961a). Stimuli were prepared by recording single vocal statements which were then spliced to form a loop of tape. Each loop was played back and rerecorded on a conventional reel to give a sitmulus which could be played for 3 minutes. […]

The subject listened to the repeated stimulus through headphones, tapping on the table and calling out what he heard as soon as he could […]

You can find plenty of other research reports by searching Google Scholar for "verbal satiation", "semantic satiation", or "verbal transformation effect". A small and somewhat random sample of the hits:

41 Comments

Gregory Dyke said,

I get this a lot when I'm programming, using a statically typed language. Most typically on the words String and Tree (names of types variables are declared as), which suddenly get me "puzzled and frightened" as the first quote so accurately described.

Randall said,

Kapitano said,

The 'satiation' effect – or something like it – also occurs with loops of music, but the 'transformation' effect does not.

Satiation is a big problem in music production, where you might hear the same recording hundreds of times – it quickly gets to the point where you can't tell whether an instrument is too loud, or even off-key.

I suspect if the transformation effect applied to music, all the religious and cultural practices which rely on musical repetition simply wouldn't work.

how do you perceive the “presently” (in the sense of “soon”) in the second excerpt?

An Irish native speaker I know, while she was perfectly aware of the two senses of “presently,” perceived it as odd to use it the way I did here: “Once the freshmen have grown accustomed to university routine, the momentum of their academic progress presently wanes, …” The Random House dictionary writes “The two senses are rarely if ever confused in actual practice. Presently meaning ‘now’ is most often used with the present tense (The professor is presently on sabbatical leave) and presently meaning ‘soon’ often with the future tense (The supervisor will be back presently).”

From this I concluded that there had to be a surprisingly clear cut complementary distribution of the meanings—as it were—between present and future tense (or the modal constructions denoting futurity). Or is “wane,” in this regard, different from “become” in some way?

Thanks!

[(myl) This is one of many, many examples, in every language, of a polysemous word that must be disambiguated in context. (See here for some earlier discussion.) The only slightly unusual thing here is that one of the senses is archaic, and so its use (as in this case) is more likely to be noticed. Please don't add 50 comments giving your own re-phrasing of the dictionary gloss that this commenter has already looked up.]

J. Goard said,

I have never been able to get such a thing to work for me. I experience no remarkable psychological effects, no matter how many times I repeat a word. The closest I get is a drift of attention, which is unremarkable. Attention drifts. So what?

Stephen R. Anderson said,

A variant of this affecting linguists specifically was once christened (I believe) by Barbara Partee as "scanting out." As I understand it (I got there just too late to be able to speak first hand), back in the 1960s linguists from the MIT Department were paid to work in the summer at MITRE, where they were supposed to study aspects of English syntax. Barbara is said to have found that after looking at a rather small number of sentences involving the word "scant" her judgments totally dissolved.

I just read the opening paragraphs of the Pitt & Shoaf paper on VTE and it occurs to me that this is a separate phenomenon from experiencing a familiar word as unfamiliar, but not through repetition (they used 2wrds/sec). For me, this other experience occurs most commonly when I'm bored and suddenly the word house sounds odd. I say it aloud and it is unfamiliar, even funny sounding. This is far more difficult to study systematically since it's difficult to re-create the experience on command. Could it be that boredom correlates with low brain activity and the network associated with recognizing house just can't quite muster enough activation to fire…this sounds like serious neuro-BS now that I've written it, ignore that last part…

Xmun said,

I remember lying in bed one night at the age of about eight and pondering what a very peculiar word "and" was. Just its spelling was what interested me. I had no notions then of word use. For some reason the spelling "and" struck me as a weird array of letters.

Chandra said,

I do this with my own name sometimes, which produces a very weird psychological effect because not only does the series of phonemes no longer make any sense, but I start to feel sort of disconnected from my own sense of self too.

MB said,

Aaron Toivo said,

Is this effect related to the one where, in reading any sort of text (but especially heavy material), you suddenly find you did not glean any meaning from a sentence and are forced to re-read it several times before it finally comes clear (which it doesn't always even do)? I'm not talking about passages you wouldn't understand in any case, but those times where your semantic engagement with the material unexpectedly goes on the blink.

When I'm caught in one, I've found I can still judge the grammaticality of the sentence, I just can't tell what it means! The mind either struggles to make anything of it, or resolves a few referents but quits there, no proposition formed. That loss of semantics is why I wonder if this effects is related to verbal satiation.

J Lee said,

I obeyed and repeated 'house' aloud rapidly (2-3x/s). Predictably the H didn't survive its adjacency to the fricative and I almost immediately recognized the S as the onset of the ridiculously low-frequency "sow." So perhaps rather than the first words that occur to us our examples should only be ones whose phonetic forms aren't distorted by repetition (a monosyllabic English word ending in a velar nasal?). More to the point, though, I think it is not sheer repetition but simply an appreciation of/mild fascination with the arbitrary sound-meaning correspondences that sort of temporarily bleaches a word — obviously even during a deep introspective episode on [haus] it will be a perfectly accessible and practical lexeme.

i once had an epiphany when i was maybe four, five or six years old: back in our home i stood in the alcove of our flat in hb for some reason, looking at my beloved roudy ™ anorak for some reason, when it occurred to me this piece was actually called anorak. anorak..? what could that mean? ano- meant nothing to me, -rak meant nothing to me, and there was just this one, anorak, anorak from the karstadt department store, the anorak, ano? rak? ano? rak? rak? ano? ano? rak? anorak? anorak?anorak? anorak?anorak?anorak? anorak?anorak?anorak? anorak?anorak?anorak???????…… got me completely mezmeryzed. beautiful anorak, let's go out into the autumn winds…

Margaret L said,

It seems to me this is a straightforward example of detector fatigue, similar to the waterfall effect, or spatial frequency or orientation aftereffects. The comparison to alternation of percepts for ambiguous figures is also spot-on. (The comparison to alternation behavior in T-mazes is just bizarre.)

Breffni said,

Arnold Zwicky did a Language Log post on "scanting out" (in which he attributes the term to Haj Ross). He describes "scanting out" on the "seem fit" construction, but by the end of the post I had the satiation experience with the word "fit". The way it struck me was not so much that I had lost my grip on the word's meaning, as that I had become unusually aware of its sound.

(Off-topic, but Arnold says in that post that "scant" "can't be used predicatively". But evidence of "evidence is scant" isn't scant. You can also find "rainfall is scant" and "money is scant", and there are other examples in the OED. And now I've got "scant" satiation.)

Nick said,

Peter Sattler said,

I assume that this phenomenon has been noticed for millennia and is at the heart both of meditative mantras and of Gertrude Stein's poetry. However I do wonder when it was first described or noted in a serious way.

Wassily Kandinsky uses the satiation effect to describe what he sees at work in abstract painting, which evacuates the representational meanings of images and allows what he calls the spiritual and emotional content of the form to come through:

The apt use of a word (in its poetical meaning), repetition of this word, twice, three times or even more frequently, according to the need of the poem, will not only tend to intensify the inner harmony but also bring to light unsuspected spiritual properties of the word itself. Further than that, frequent repetition of a word (again a favourite game of children, which is forgotten in after life) deprives the word of its original external meaning.

This is from 1910's Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Are there any 19th-century (or earlier) considerations?

(I'm sorry that I cannot access the PsycNET links to check this myself.)

[(myl) The quote from Kandinsky is interesting — thanks for that!

Psychology didn't really exist as an experimental science until the second half of the 19th century — Wundt founded his lab in Leipzig in 1879; James Cattell founded the psychology lab at Penn in 1887; Titchener (who studied with Wundt) started the psychology lab at Cornell in 1892. Before that, experiments in what we would now call psychology were carried out by physicists, physicians, or general polymaths. Though verbal "satiation effects" are interesting, they're rather far down on the list of phenomena that are likely to have seized the attention of such people.

So the existence of such effects may very well have been noted briefly by some ancient Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Chinese or Arabic writer, but I would be surprised to find any systematic studies in earlier times.]

Alix said,

Have experienced this phenomenon personally– also a phenomenon wherein a particular word starts to 'look' like what it describes: "angry" begins to 'look' peeved, if not outraged; and "hungry" simply cries out to be fed.

Ellis said,

'Have you ever tried the experiment of saying some plain word, such as "dog," thirty times? By the thirtieth time it has become a word like "snark" or "pobble." It does not become tame, it becomes wild, by repetition. In the end a dog walks about as startling and undecipherable as Leviathan or Croquemitaine'. – G.K. Chesterton, 'The Telegraph Poles', which was first collected in 1910 (Alarms and Discursions); the first publication would, knowing GKC, have been not much earlier.

Ray Dillinger said,

It seems to take much more than 30 repetitions for me. When fully awake and alert, I don't lose track of a word's meaning or correctness in the first half-hour of repeating it. In an altered state of consciousness (meditation, hypnosis, etc) it seems to come on nearly spontaneously.

If I start by convincing myself that it'll happen, it happens faster or more easily. I wonder how much of this is confirmation bias or self-hypnosis of the experience happening because the people expect the experience.

Fergus said,

Silent repetition of one's own name. Here is a footnote from the 'Mysticism' chapter of William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience. I suppose that the repeated word was 'Alfred'…

"I have never had any revelations through anaesthetics, but a kind of waking trance – this for lack of a better word – I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state but the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words – where death was an almost laughable impossibility – the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life. I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words?"
Professor Tyndall, in a letter, recalls Tennyson saying of this condition: "By God Almighty! There is no delusion in the matter! It is no nebulous ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder, associated with absolute clearness of mind." Memoirs of Alfred Tennyson, ii. 473.

John said,

Back in the '60s, while teaching TOEFL in Bangkok, a class repetition exercise–"The nice witch washed the fresh bats first"–sent me for a loop on about the 20th cycle. After that, I found a variety of words would trigger a strange state.

Chandra said,

@Fergus: That is indeed an interesting description of the sensation produced.

For curiosity's sake, I tried doing this with a word from a language I learned later in life ("hermano", Spanish for "brother"). Interestingly, no matter how many times I typed out the word or repeated it in my head, I could not get it to disassociate from its definition. On the other hand, once I repeated the exercise with "brother", it started looking and sounding foreign to me after only a few repetitions.

[…] [article] Word Weirding The first systematic study of the VT effect employed British sailors as subjects (Warren, 1961a). Stimuli were prepared by recording single vocal statements which were then spliced to form a loop of tape. Each loop was played back and rerecorded on a conventional reel to give a sitmulus which could be played for 3 minutes. […] […]

This reminds me of what sometimes happens when I try to define a word for someone. The definition requires the use of other words which in turn call for definition. It seems that process always leads back to the original word…so the definition of the original word ends up being the same word. Yikes!